Digital Marketing is SEO’s Girlfriend

If SEO were to bring home a girlfriend to meet his parents, her name would be Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing (DM) is the attractive one of the two, and SEO is probably the one carrying her books (and doing her homework). One cannot live without the other in the online era. A digital marketer’s strategy is often driven by the analytics that SEO provides, likewise, there would be no data to analyze if it were not for the content that DM provides. SEO and DM dance together like an elegant foxtrot when done correctly but how is it done really?

I’ve Grown Tired of Buzzwords

Don’t let Digital Marketing and Search Engine Optimization dance circles around you. They are simple in concept but shaky in proper execution. That’s because SEO is squishy. Squishy in the sense that content distribution is sent out according to strategy developed by thebuyer persona. Buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer based on research data.

What experience are they looking for when seeking out your products or services?

What are their most common objections to your product or service?

A Data Scientist’s Quinoa and Vegetables

If that’s what you’re into. Really what math nerds do is segment consumers into different markets so companies can identify consumers’ individual interests and develop a marketing strategy. As seen in the buyer persona, digital marketing segmentation is now more complex than “traditional demographics”. We are interested in what they value most, where they go for information, what they expect from your user experience, where they are when they interact with your brand and what they don’t like about your product. How does a company gain that level of insight? The internet is drowning in exabytes of data and it’s the job of Digital Marketing’s nerdy boyfriend, SEO, to crunch the numbers. Data Scientists – another buzzword for a math nerd – are spending their days accessing exabytes of information captured by social media and listening to the voice of the customer through site visits, clicks, page views, purchases and interactions. When the homework cycle is finished, the SEO boyfriend hands the results to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

“Digital is not just a group of people or a component of a business process. It’s a new way of doing a multitude of things…It is anchored with the customer at the center” – AMA 2016

Create Digital Highways for Consumers To Access Your Content

We have spoken before about identifying our audience, but have you seen it in action behind the scenes? Once you do it may prompt you to spend less of your time on social media – at least it did for me. I spent this week creating a Twitter account and a Facebook page for AutomateMyLife.org and the results are astounding!

Digital Marketing is about creating digital highways to your brand. Branding is about consistently telling your story on all platforms. AML’s first foray into Digital Marketing was done with Twitter. If you notice in the feed we tweeted some of our blog posts and we now have FOUR followers! We also received ONE like on our Grassroots SEO post. Let’s examine our followers and see what they are all about. Two of our new followers describe themselves as Digital Sociologist and a Digital Marketing/SEO strategist respectively.

The other two followers are more interesting. Both followers are companies that are trying to attract us to their product. Codeanywhere.com’s Twitter description reads “A complete toolset for web development. Enabling you to edit, collaborate and run your projects from any device.” We didn’t get this follower until we tweeted about automating a LEMP install with Python. Our new friend may be doing exactly what we are trying to do, find an audience interested in what our brand provides (in this case a programming tool that supports Python). Our second friend has a twitter profile written in another language, so we’re now international!

Going international in our first week being online with Twitter is an accomplishment. Especially when you consider we did that without paying for Twitter Ads or using any other Twitter segmenting features. Digital Marketing is a different beast when it comes to Facebook, digital Return on Investment (ROI) seems to be harder to earn.

Facebook is a different beast altogether. When creating our Facebook presence, we are able to identify the total potential audience – 473,279,098 people – after entering our interests. Out of 473M possible consumers to reach, we have had ZERO interactions with our brand. This is just a taste of what Digital Marketers go through to establish a digital presence. Buying Facebook Ads would increase our Facebook but there is another facet of Digital Marketing that we haven’t spoken of yet and that is Email campaigns.

Expand Your Market Through E-Mail Marketing

Brandi Starr, President & Marketing Strategist at Cassius Blue Consulting, says “the most successful digital marketers leverage highly-targeted, timely, and personalized email communications to attract, nurture, and convert their ideal customers… Savvy marketers are leveraging marketing automation to deliver the right message at the ideal time.” Brandi said the magic word, automation. The one thing we haven’t done here at Automate My Life is create an automatic email subscription service for our readers to subscribe to through our website. Users should have the option to subscribe to our blog and get notifications when new posts are fresh off the WordPress. Email marketing will also be used in the future to target different blog followers based upon the topics they’re interested so they only get notified of the blog posts that may pique their interest. There you have it, email marketing is what AML is missing but not to worry, in a future post I will show you how to interact with the Google Email API to create our own bootlegged email subscription service. Most companies would choose an email marketing company, like MailChimp or MailGun, to distribute their email campaigns. These companies allow you to manage your newsletters, create templates, ensure delivery, and provide analytics for impact. Even though a company may send out email marketing, the ability to know if that consumer actually opened your email or clicked through to your website because of the email notification is invaluable. With traditional flyer marketing (the kind you get in your physical mailbox), marketing ROI is next to impossible to determine. With services like MailChimp, instant marketing ROI can be a daily metric for your brand.

Summary of a Lasting DM and SEO Relationship

We have discussed in depth how Digital Marketing and SEO are a power couple, as well as discover the previously unknown utility of the email marketing campaign. Establishing a web presence for a chosen industry is no easy task and will potentially take many sleepless nights until you build a substantial following. Just remember to be true to your brand and consistent across all the social media platforms.